Hey team, wondering if we should get LinkedIn Sales Navigator for the grants outreach team?
Rationale
The idea is that on LinkedIN sometimes DM’s are blocked (so you can’t message someone directly) or if a contact is a 3rd network connection their entire profile is blacked or blocked out, so with sales navigator we would have access to all senior or executive team members accounts / DMs, which is a great benefit in the research phase. In some cases there are no alternate contact details like email with blocked profiles but if you have Linkedin Navigator you can inbox people. The idea is “pay to play” and then you get access to people’s inbox.
We would do our outreach on Linkedin for the following reasons:
Reach out to VC’s, institutional donors, VC’s, impact investors, grant decision makers and both corporate and individual donors.
Target leads by job title, profession or industry
Get insider feedback on our grant’s approach
Ask questions to key people on the team or to follow up on grant status
Build rapport with grants reviewers and hopefully get special insights to improve our chances of qualifying for the grant.
The Ask
Unfortunately Linkedin doesn’t offer any nonprofit plans, I already checked with them directly on this. The monthly investment is $95.23/month and annual is $685.60 (save $457.16)
Wdyt?
Please vote below:
Yes in favour of Linkedin Sales Navigator
No not in favor
I have questions / concerns and will write them below in the comments
Hey @tropicalmango thanks for sharing this on the forum and providing space to comment!
I must admit my position on this is neutral. Personally, I haven’t had great success with LinkedIn lately, especially within the web3 community - I found twitter, discord and forums are the best places to reach out to these people.
That being said, I would never discourage any effort to build a stronger network for our fundraising., and again, this is just my personal experience, others might have better results.
Maybe it’s best if we commit ourselves for 1 month premium subscription and really go crazy with reach outs to see the impact. If successful, let’s upgrade it to annual which is less costly in the long-run.
I agree with @yass
We can give it a try for a couple of months and decide upon the results we get.
I also think the web3 community is more into discord/telegram/Twitter and LinkedIn is more the old school but it might be worth giving it a try.
I think this could be considered the cost of capital. If we want investors, we are likely going to need to “pay” to find them. And I do see good possibilities of outreach in Linkedin
Having said that… I don’t think all the Fundraising team would need it. I think one person can focus on Linkedin. I also agree with @yass . Let’s test our hypothesis and make a decision.
Sounding like a broken record because I am just adding the same thoughts as everyone else. Let’s give it a try, but limit it to one person, and see what the results are.
So I have a lot of experience with LinkedIn and I’m currently paying for it for Recruitment. I think we could get most of the benefits without having to pay.
Based on my experience, most people respond better to messages when you send them a connection request (which you can do to anyone, even if they are third-degree connections unless they only allow people to add them if they have their email, which is very rare) and then in the connection request send an intro message there. I found this gets at least a 3 times better response than Inmails + it adds them as a Connection to make it easier for you to follow up, builds more rapport and looks a lot less spammy.
A useful feature for paying for LinkedIn is the advanced filter and search. I do use that often for recruitment, but when I find someone from the advanced search I usually just send them a message in the connection requests.
One way we can test this out without paying is to try the method I said first (adding people as connections and sending them an intro message there), and if you need me to give you profiles for VC’s, I can extract as many as you need from my account and send you a list to reach out to. I think this would be best since we’re using Hubspot for a CRM and we wouldn’t use the built-in LinkedIn CRM anyway.
Thanks for the amazing and detailed feedback @aabugosh.
I currently am following #1 with all of my outreach. Unfortunately, my “hit” or success rate hasn’t been that high with “sending a connection request along with a note” for VC’s, so I’d still be interested to see that if with Sales Navigator there is a stronger response specifically for VC’s, as I’m sure they are getting bombarded with any type of messages daily on LI, but I am also not sure paying for Sales Navigator would increase the response due to the very same reason…so I’m torn.
@JakeS Fair enough! If you want to go for a free trial and see if you notice a difference, I’d say go for it as an experiment. However, based on what I’ve seen in the past Inmail or Sales navigator outreach has always had a lower response than connect requestion messages (they go to a different inbox and are flagged completely differently and seem very “salesy”). I think trying to reach out on different mediums like Twitter or direct email would probably get better results.
Also, I’d say what would be more impactful would be to try to get creative with getting a first response, and work on the messaging instead. Maybe Stee can give feedback on that? We can try things like recording short video intros for each person, giving them a free sample (maybe offering them free GIV tokens to try our platform out for themselves) or customizing the message better to get a response. I think just a standard text wouldn’t stand out much, so we should think about ways to make it hard for them not to respond!
I think you hit the nail on the head there, no matter if we pay to play or use the free version, we need to think of a stronger and more creative way to get through and even raise our percentages of success by 1 or 2%. Once we find the right outreach means, then it doesn’t matter which version of LI we are using.
@aabugosh@JakeS@yass sounds like the solution might be for us to put our heads together to craft the messages based on a specific target group that we can try using for outreach and then maybe you can download a test target list for us @aabugosh? From there we can divide and conquer. Wdyt?
Yes, sounds good! I would say 1) Let’s get creative with the messaging and 2) When you have a target list of who you want to target (a persona or demographic), let me know and I can help extract a list of Linkedin profiles
hey @lhige from my understanding Linkedin pulls up the latest info from their users. We decided to put this on hold for now because with the holidays, it will be hard to reach our targets and the main business dev/sales person on the team said he hasn’t had much success with it and doesn’t really want to use it, so we’ll do without for now. Apprecaite your comment!
If successful, let’s upgrade it to annual which is less costly in the long-run.